Gaming PC £400-£600 suggestions

okay that thats good news then that i can overclock it quite high with the matterhorn heatsink. As in regards to using the thermal paste plan plan to use arctic cooling MX-4 thermal paste would that be good enough to cool the over clocked i5 at 4 or whatever GHZ?
 
MX-2 is actually better. In fact, the Gelid GC-Extreme is one of the best available on OcUK. There isn't much between them anyway. Another good one is the Thermalright Chill Factor III, provided with Thermalright coolers.

Anyway, the Alpenföhn paste provided should be perfectly adequate.
 
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russell664 said:
Ok the reason i asked was because I have some MX-4 already, how quiet would you say this system could be?
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I wouldn't worry about the CPU cooler in terms of noise. Dunno about the case. The PSU should be virtually silent, the GPU maybe a bit noisy at load.

The MX-4 is good to go. Commando games look like a shoe-in for laptop gaming.
 
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That's good to hear that it will be a quiet system. What kind of operating temperatures would the running CPU be at both at load and idle. What kind of temperature bracket would I be looking to prevent overheating?
 
russell664 said:
That's good to hear that it will be a quiet system. What kind of operating temperatures would the running CPU be at both at load and idle. What kind of temperature bracket would I be looking to prevent overheating?
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LOAD : 65C-75C (hot weather).
IDLE : 25C-40C (hot weather).
Aim at 70C (about 45C-50C delta), 1.325 Vcore or there about for overclocking. Should give you a good clock (4.2GHz) without damaging the CPU.

The main bottleneck on SB is not temps but the Vcore. Under 1.35V (1.3V, 1.325V) is generally considered safe, and easy to cool down. Then depending on chip, you get various speeds 4.2GHz->4.6GHz on gold chips, even higher on exceptional chips). Same for Ivy, except IB temps ramp up quicker once you push the Vcore too much. So as long as you don't exceed 1.35V or whatever the 'wall' is for a particular chip, then you should have no temperature problems, pretty much on any decent cooler. Then each chip will give you a diferent clock speed on that voltage.
 
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Thats a lot of information about temp. :) I thought the highest temps should have been around 75 to 80 degrees. Is the ivy bridge as easy to overclock as the sandy bridge? If so how do I do it, I want to know a lot before I try anything. :)
 
I've just used my overclocking presets from my motherboard, and decreased the Vcore used as it was too high. Select memory XMP profile for memory timings, set Vram to 1.55V, stability test (memtest, prime95 two hours), HWMonitor and CPU-Z for temps, votages, clocks and fan speeds, bob's your uncle. MSI's have a one-click button for overclocking. I'd still recommend decreasing the vcore they use as it's usually very conservative and too high. Also used Unigine and MSI Afterburner to monitor and stress-test the GPU. Prime95 + Unigine to test the PSU. I think OCCT has loads of useful stuff as well.

Plenty of guides to optimise overclocking. It's still very easy. Couple of voltages and modes to tweak, and should be there in no time.
 
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